Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

The household, in the suburban no-man’s-land between the South Side of Chicago and the heavy-industrial powerhouse of northwest Indiana, was Americanized, but Willem grew up bilingual in English and Dutch. From time to time the family would make weekend forays into Chicago’s Chinatown, but Bel spoke the wrong dialect and so it was a foreign place to her. Willem did learn how to read many Chinese characters, albeit in the traditional form still used in Taiwan.

He held dual Dutch and American citizenship. In high school he went to the Netherlands for what was supposed to be one semester. In effect, though, he had never returned. His great-aunt Alexandra and his aunt Mina had ended up in The Hague. They were happy to have him in their home, and he was happy to be in a place where his complicated ancestry was not considered remarkable. In The Hague, he was just another Indo. Not only that, but there was also a community of Chinese-Dutch in the area who had more in common with the Kuoks, including some mutual acquaintances and business connections in Southeast Asia. And, finally, there were openly gay people, and Willem was gay. So after that, when he went back to America, he did so not as an American coming home, but as a Dutchman crossing the sea to pay a visit to his foreign relatives. High school led to university, and that led to grad school at Oxford, and a Ph.D. in foreign relations, specializing in the intricacies of the world that the Kuoks still, to this day, lived in.

So much for the first half of Willem’s life (or so he’d conceived of it in the days when he’d imagined that life was basically over at sixty). Returning to the Netherlands after a brief postdoc stint in China, he’d got caught up in politics and surprised himself by getting elected to a parliamentary post. He was a member of the center-right party that was almost always part of every governing coalition and that accounted for many cabinet members. Re-elected a few years later, he found himself with a junior cabinet position relating to defense. And this developed into a career that accounted for much of the “second half” of his life. For decades he had reliably been re-elected and served in various posts mostly related to intelligence, foreign affairs, or defense. His name had been mentioned from time to time as a possible minister of defense or even prime minister, but he had never really sought that level of responsibility. Not until 2006 had there been an openly gay cabinet minister, so there was that.

But the positions in which he had served had placed him in frequent contact with the reigning monarchs, who received regular briefings on the matters for which Willem was responsible. They got to know him, and to like him. The story had got round of the manner of Johannes Castelein’s death, and his last words. With that in his family background, no one could be seen as more Dutch than Willem. But his multi-racialness, his childhood in America, and his sexuality made him interesting: just the embodiment of the modern Netherlands that the House of Orange would want to have around the palace as proof of relevancy and with-it-ness. So as the “second half” of his life drew to a close and he found himself as vigorous as he had been at thirty, with his faculties intact, and with absolutely no interest in retiring, he had entered their service.

He’d thought the pickup truck a quirky, ironic choice when he’d picked it out in Waco. He’d taken a selfie with it to share with Remi, his husband. Since then, though, he’d learned that it served as camouflage in these parts. No one would look twice at a white pickup. His tailored suits and polished shoes had been destroyed in the crash. He had gone on a shopping spree in the menswear section at Walmart. In those clothes, driving that vehicle, he drew very little attention as he drove across East Texas and Louisiana, making only brief stops for food, gasoline, and toilet.

Hendrik and Bel had learned very early that there was a thing called the Illinois Central Railroad that would enable them to escape the brutality of Chicago winters. Merely by purchasing affordable tickets and hopping on a train at Chicago’s Union Station, they could doze off as the frozen corn stubble of Illinois glided past the windows and wake up in the nearly tropical environment of the Delta.

During the industrial boom years before the 1974 oil shock, Hendrik had climbed the ladder to management just as adroitly as he had once clambered up trees in Javanese concentration camps. And no one knew how to pinch pennies better than a survivor. They bought a piece of land outside of New Orleans, improved it (meaning that they filled in wetlands), sold half of it off at a profit, and, not long after the turn of the century, retired to the other half. Bel had come down with dementia and passed away a few years ago. Willem’s youngest sister, Jenny, fleeing a bad marriage, had moved in as caretaker. Various members of the overseas Kuok clan moved in and out, pitching in on household chores while using the property as a U.S. base of operations for more or less complicated endeavors the details of which Willem made no real effort to stay abreast of. All he knew, and all he cared about, was that someone was always around to keep an eye on Hendrik and help him out of a jam, should he get into one. Which he never did.

You got to the house by driving through the suburban development that had been erected on the portion of the land that Hendrik and Bel had sold. At the end of a curving subdivision street the trees closed in over a road that had suddenly reverted to gravel, and a slow crunching drive through a tunnel of dark green led to a gate flanked by ornamental lions. The gate wasn’t locked. Willem felt the truck gaining a few all-important inches of altitude as things opened up and the sun illuminated stripes of orange zinnias flanking the driveway. Bel had established the tradition of planting these every year. In Indonesia before the war, Dutch colonists and loyal Indos had grown them as a symbol of national pride. In America they were a ubiquitous garden plant. The symbolism of the color would be lost on most people here, but Willem of all people knew what it meant.

The driveway looped around in front of an old two-story house, torn down in sections over the years and rebuilt out of cinder block because of termites. Father rarely ventured upstairs anymore, but wings had been added to the house at ground level. Willem parked his truck at the base of a flagpole flying the Dutch tricolor beneath a larger Stars and Stripes. Before shutting off the engine he sat there for a minute, letting the A/C run, and using PanScan—one of several competing apps in the anonymized contact tracing space—to check his immunological status versus that of everyone currently in the house. Since Willem was the interloper, he was the most likely to be bringing new viral strains in to this household.

Eventually the app produced a little map of the property, showing icons for everyone there, color-coded based on epidemiological risk. The upshot was that Willem could get by without a mask provided he kept his distance from Hendrik. Oh, and if he ventured upstairs he should put a mask on because there was a Kuok in the second bedroom on the left whose recent exposure history was almost as colorful as Willem’s.

Accordingly he and his father sat two meters apart in a gazebo in the snatch of mowed lawn between the house and the bank where the property plunged into the bayou. It was screened—everything here had to be—but a faint breeze moved through it and Willem made sure he was downwind of his father. Hendrik always had a walker near to hand, in case he should require it, but could easily move a few steps unassisted. He sat down at the gazebo’s cast-concrete table. Jenny brought out soft drinks on a tray. Hendrik raised a sweating glass of seltzer. Willem did likewise. They pantomimed clinking them together. “To the queen!” Hendrik said.